Review: No, Not Gone with the Wind

Do you know of an email client named Eudora? It was developed in the late 1980s at the University of Illinois by Steve Dorner. He had read a short story by Eudora Welty entitled “Why I Live at the P. O.,” which narrates the story of a woman who decides to abandon her family to live at her workplace. As a tribute to this short story, Dorner named his program after the author who—it is said—was very honored.

In a time when almost no one reads literature but reads instead computer spam and other subterfuges to kill boredom, Eudora Welty still remains in the annals of modernity. Almost no one knows that this short story gave a new dimension to Welty and solidified her status as a writer. “Why I Live at the P. O.” appeared in the first book she published, A Curtain of Green. Some of her stories were published in magazines such as The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly starting in 1936.² With A Curtain of Green she achieved notoriety thanks in part to the already recognized Texas short-story writer, Katherine Anne Porter. Porter would become Welty’s mentor and even offered to write the preface to A Curtain of Green to give Welty some publicity. In the 1950s, Welty abandoned her previous career³ as a photographer and immersed herself in the process of writing. In this way she became part of the heaven of Southern authors of which, without a doubt, Faulkner was the God. From a current perspective, Welty with Porter, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor are considered the feminine quartet who established the basis of American realistic stories.

Now that we have passed the [2009] centenary anniversary of the birth of this lady of letters, we can say that Welty is present with us in two ways. Her collected stories are published for the first time in Spain. Welty’s godmother’s stories [Porter’s] have already been published by Lumen. This is a reason to celebrate; the only deficiency is many of its pages are difficult to read. Additionally, Welty’s portrait was shown in Annie Leibovitz’s acclaimed exhibition, seen last month [September 2009] in Madrid. This portrait shows Welty, already in her 90s, smiling with a sly brilliance in her look that may be considered an emblem of the curiosity with which she contemplated the daily life of her native South. She saw life, at first, from behind the camera lenses, then with a fountain pen in hand. In fact, the Museum of the City of New York is currently showing⁴ a selection of her photographs of the Great Depression. Although this selection is in line with the photojournalistic documentation of Dorothea Lange, Lange’s work is weak in comparison. In relation to her stories, Welty has been considered a writer whose stories are individually widely varied; therefore, one is pleased to read a collection of her short narratives side-by-side. Collected Stories compiles the short stories from her books: A Curtain of Green (1941), The Wide Net (1943), The Golden Apples (1949), The Bride of the Innisfallen (1955), and two other stories that had not been previously gathered.

In addition to writing short stories, Welty wrote novels. With La hija del optimista / The Optimist’s Daughter (now published by Impedimenta) she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973, a prize that Porter had obtained some years before and that was granted to the writer Elizabeth Strout last year. Welty also wrote literary criticism and, in 1983, she published an autobiography, One Writer’s Beginnings, which has been translated here with the title of La palabra heredada (Montesinos). We are not trying to say that her work was barely known in her circles; the talented Truman Capote admired Welty for her short stories. Her success as a writer seldom goes beyond the geographic borders of the place where she was born and raised. She is a writer who, engrained in her...